We linked to videos in PKBeats’ long Smash Bros trivia series recently, but while perusing some other things they’ve uploaded this came up (18 minutes), and frogdarnit, it was too interesting to let pass. You could also load the video starting directly at the start of the discussion, almost three minutes in. Text info below.
Here’s the gist. In the Smash Bros. series, Mr. Game & Watch has a move called Judge, where he holds up a sign with a number from 1 to 9, and depending on the number one of nine different effects can happen, with possibilities like dropping food, producing a fire effect, damaging G&W himself, or, if a 9 comes up, executing an extremely powerful attack like a slightly weaker version of the game’s famous Home Run Bat item, that usually KOs an opponent.
The number that appears, and so the effect product, for the most part seems random, and a good thing too with Number 9’s immense power. Judge never executes the same move twice in a row, so if a 9 wasn’t the last result produced, you have a ⅛th chance to get it the next time… usually.
It had been noticed by some that, in certain circumstances, Judge produces a 9 result much more often, like half the time, but the details of the phenomenon were not fully known. Through sheer bloody-minded experimentation, PKBeats found out that the result is largely due to whether Mr. G&W is behind in scoring, and not just behind, but far behind. I’ll let the video give the precise lowdown, but in essence Mr. Game & Watch must have half or less of lives (sorry, “stocks” in Smash lingo) remaining compared to his opponent, and there must be 30 seconds or less left in the match.
So: it’s yet another catch-up mechanic, a way for G&W to clear opponents rapidly if it looks like he’s going to lose. Since it only comes into play at the end of a match, it almost never can make a difference though unless G&W is on his last life, and his opponent has two lives left. In that scenario G&W has a good chance of getting off a 9 and taking off a stock immediately… putting both characters on their last stock, and now G&W has to run up his opponent’s percent in the short remaining time without the increased Judge 9 chances. Doesn’t seem too useful, but then if it were actually useful, someone out there would probably have built a strategy off of it, so I guess it’s for the best that it’s so infrequent.
We’re approaching DragonCon again in a few days, meaning my time is going to be taken up with wandering around and probably playing more of Bombergirl in their game room. So for the next week it’s low effort posts to make our demanding once-daily schedule. Here we go!
NeoGamer on Youtube has an entertaining, not to mention loooong, video with short clips from 200 strange games they’ve played in their channel. (1 hour 27 minutes) Right off the bat they start out weird, and they don’t let up. Please consume responsibly.
The C64 Appreciation Society has two videos on works by Access Software, which got its start making Commodore 64 games. Their first product was an interesting wargame called Beach-Head. It followed an interconnected mini-game structure, where your success at each game determined how many ships would survive to make it to the beach, which gave the player more chances to make it through an obstacle gauntlet and destroy the weak points on the enemy fortress. Beach-Head was particularly known for its graphics and its excellent sound design. In this video on Beach-Head (27 minutes), The C64 Appreciation Society plays through the game, showing off strategy and explaining its history along the way.
Access Software made other games, and would eventually begin the Tex Murphy series, but unquestionably their greatest legacy was their line golf sims, which began on the C66 with Leaderboard Golf (16 minutes). They’d move on eventually to making PC golf games, especially the Links series, which were so well-regarded that Microsoft bought the company specifically to make more golf games.
Eventually their work on computer golf would result in the formation of a subsidiary called TruGolf that made golf simulators, consisting of a huge screen and set of sensors that detects how you swing clubs and shows you your ball’s flight afterward, in a kind of deluxe version of Wii Sports Golf. Although Access would be eventually sold to Take-Two and is now no more, TruGolf survives to this day, and now they make simulators for other sports than golf, such as bowling and baseball.
You might not believe this from our unassuming appearance, but I consider Set Side B to be “The Real Deal.” I work hard to present something, anything, to you on the subject of computer entertainment each and every day. Often it’s a simple link to something someone has written, or a video they made. Sometimes, when time and energy allows, it’s a longer piece that one of us has made ourselves. We try to keep it on the site of things you’re less likely to find elsewhere, but you’ll find lots of crazy random stuff here, and that’s by design. And please know that, if something doesn’t go up at 10 AM on a day, it’s because something has gone wrong.
In April we’ll have been doing this for five years, and I am set to continue bringing new things to you into the future even after that. Some days it’s hard to find something new to post; some days I have multiple things that I want to bring to you, and it’s a hard decision which to present first.
But I understand that the sheer variety of things that SSB presents may be bewildering. I mention sometimes that our three watchwords are Retro, Indie and Niche. If you’re interested in just one of these three, to the exclusion of the others, then you probably want to read a specific category. Nearly everything posted here goes into one of the three categories Retro, Indie or Niche, or else on Sundays when we relax the format a bit, into SundaySundry. In this way, Set Side B is really like four blogs in one, five if you count the rarely-used news and blognews categories (this post falls under blognews). You can find all the categories on a post beneath its author box in the left sidebar <-.
Let me break these down:
By “Retro” I mean older games generally. I am of an age that I consider anything before the N64 era to be Retro, but I am considering updating that to before the Playstation 2 era. I judge that the PS2/Xbox/Nintendo Gamecube/Dreamcast era is around when game graphics reached the point, on casual observation, where you had to stop and look for a sec to notice that it wasn’t photorealistic, where increases in graphical quality hit the point of diminishing returns. I’m not saying that graphics didn’t improve after that point, far from it, but that we reached the point where capabilities increased, but didn’t enable completely new kinds of things. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. So I think the PS1/N64/Saturn age is where we’ll draw the line at what Retro means.
On to “Indies,” these are the province of my co-blogger Josh Bycer, who runs the Game Wisdom channel on Youtube. Note that, if you go by the raw text of the category name, a spurious decision made early in the blog’s history means that the category name is plural, so, “indies”. These are small-team, or even solo developers, which is where, due to the immense reluctance to rock the boat that most AAA developers have, much of the energy in pushing forward the frontiers of gaming reside now. It’s not solely Josh’s province though, and I also find things to add to this pile from time to time, often, suitably enough, under the gamefinds tag.
I’ll admit that the “Niche” category is a bit of a cheat, a way to include some things that don’t fall under the other two. Intended to spotlight games that are interesting takes on a genre, especially roguelikes, often it’s the feed that gets all the Nintendo-related stuff. Nintendo is often considered an AAA developer, but they still have the potential to surprise sometimes. If Microsoft or Sony decided to pack it in and leave game publishing then it’d be a blow, sure, but the loss of Nintendo, and their weirdly-persisting toymaker vibe, would be disastrous. In my opinion, of course.
“SundaySundry” is where our weekly collection of game culture finds, mostly videos, goes. Again, because of a decision made early on, usually this group is presented as Sundry Sunday, with the order of the words reversed from the category.
There are some other categories too, which overlap with these. Probably the most important of these is @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch columns on roguelikes. This is mostly the same as the roguelike category, and both are subsets of Retro for the most part. You can also find lots of cool stuff in the romhacks category.
In addition to categories, I’m a strong believer in tagging, and all of the categories listed are also tags. Tags are a much more fine-grained system though. Game series, titles, developers, and individual content makers each get their own tags. The way Set Side B’s Mastodon autoposter works, it tries to include as many tags as it can in the body of the post, even to the exclusion of much of its description, but whatchu gonna do? Because of all the tags I add to posts, you can get around pretty well just by using tags! There’s a list of our most common tags in our tag cloud in the right sidebar, but so you won’t have to search for the link it here it is again.
The right sidebar is also where you’ll find the sign-up for our email-based, very non-Signal newsletter. That’s working now right? I should ask the always-wonderful Phil Nelson, who maintains the site and pays the bills, is that’s operational now. We’ve considered adding the odd extra thing exclusively for the newsletter. When it’s working, that is.
So there you have it. If you’re only, only interested in roguelikes, you now have the means to only see material relating to that. If your lifeblood is indie gaming, then you can get that too, and may I congratulate you on your worth as a human being. If you just want to see silly video stuff about games, then away with you to the back alley of Sunday Sundry, where the disreputable sorts who dispense with that kind of stuff lurk, as with that sunglasses-wearing frog who hands out romhacks.
Again, a Kickstarter for a sequel to General Chaos. I frankly can’t believe this is happening. It’s a sequel to a little-known, yet brilliant, Genesis/Mega Drive combat game with serious developer star power behind it. How did this get started? Are there other people in the world who love General Chaos as much as I do? Perhaps even more than I do? The prospect makes me wonder.
Promo image for Major Snafu, from the Kickstarter page.
General Chaos was the product of a couple of ex-Midway developers, and creators of some of their most iconoclastic hits, Brian Colin and Jeff Nauman. They were the creators of Rampage, one of the standouts of the Silver Age of arcades, and the basis of a certain popular movie. They tend to dwell in the shadow of the likes of Ed Boon and John Tobias, creators of Mortal Kombat, and Mark Turmell of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. Yet there’s a strong argument that could be made that NBA Jam wouldn’t have existed without the similar-in-play Arch Rivals from the same company, which was from Colin and Nauman.
In addition to Arch Rivals and Rampage, Colin and Nauman worked on Spy Hunder, Xenophobe and Pigskin 621 AD, before leaving Midway and striking out on their own under the banner of Game Refuge. And that’s where they made General Chaos for the Genesis, published by Electronic Arts. And hey, Game Refuge still exists, while Midway is currently a locked cabinet full of IP somewhere in a basement of either Warner Bros. Entertainment, or the company currently called “Light & Wonder,” (I don’t know Pete I don’t think I buy it) but contains such multitudes as “Scientific Games,” “Autotote Corporation,” “Shuffle Master,” “WMS Industries,” “Bally,” or even other totemic brands that once saw better days. These days they mostly sell to casinos, may they speedily pass on their way to hell.
General Chaos isn’t one of their best known titles, but it has a certain something. It’s a cartoony, comedic take on deadly warfare. The Kickstarter calls it a predecessor of the real-time strategy genre, and there is some of that there certainly, but truthfully General Chaos is something entirely unique. It’s an intrinsically two-sided battlefield action combat game where the warzone is made of single screens, and where each player controls a team of five soliders with different abilities (with one exception I’ll mention in a bit). In action it feels a bit like Mattel’s classic tank combat games Armor Battle for the Intellivision and Armor Ambush for the Atari 2600, in that a single player must command multiple units, but with much more depth.
Gameplay from General Chaos. This and all following screenshots are from Mobygames.
There is also quite a bit of General Chaos essence in Team Fortress 2, even though it’s not an FPS, for both its comical, satirical atmosphere and its array of characters which each have substantial differences from each other. There are gunners, rocket launchers, grenadiers, flame throwers and dynamite chuckers. Most of the time characters are controlled indirectly: control a cursor to point at a location and press the B button to send your current character to it. C changes characters, and A tells all your units to fire their weapons. They automatically pick their targets.
Hand-to-hand combat
When opposing soldiers get near each other the battle pauses and they engage in hand-to-hand battle, in the form of a simple fighting game. Combatants who are knocked down can be revived by pointing at them with the cursor and pressing A to call in one of a limited number of Medics. Characters who fall too often will eventually turn into a pile of bones and vanish. Additional Medic uses can be found on the battlefield, and are also awarded for reaching certain point totals.
General Chaos Commando team battle
As an alternative playstyle, a side can choose to field a pair of Commandos. If one player is using Commandos they must divide their attention between them, but two players can also play co-op with a Commando apiece. Commandos don’t use the indirect method of control, and instead control directly. This can make them much more effective warriors, but comes at the cost of only being two people to a squad, instead of a full team of five. Commandos can call in Medics too, but must reach their teammate in person to do so.
There are lots of worthy games from the 16-bit era that didn’t receive their due, and while I don’t know how well it sold, General Chaos always struck me as a bit of a sleeper hit. Video game genres were already becoming locked-down, and Electronic Arts was already showing signs of abandoning their reputation for nurturing talent and becoming the grotesque behemoth they are today. I’m surprised they don’t outright own the rights to General Chaos, but it appears they do not, or maybe Game Refuge bought it back from them.
The Kickstarter page makes it clear that Colin and Neuman have spent a lot of time thinking about how their classic wargame could be improved. There are more characters planned, more control options, between battle upgrades and most interesting of all, the ability to “go commando” and take direct control of any unit on your side. Home turf battles come with extra units on a given side, “expendables” that have limited abilities but help to give defenders a slight edge. There’s an array of stretch goals, with an especially interesting one at $200k: an arcade version. I think General Chaos was always destined for the arcade, and now it may finally happen.
So if all of this seems interesting to you, please consider supporting their project. Because war is a deadly serious business, so the best thing any of us can do is to laugh at it.
In case you saw AsumSaus’ name atop yesterday’s post and assuming it was going to be some great bit of Smash Bros. nonsense, but then was disappointed when it turned out to be World of Warcraft and Dark Souls (phooey!), here’s the beginning of PKBeat’s series where they’re in the middle of giving you the lowdown on every one of Smash Bros. Ultimate’s many Assist Trophies.
Just some of interesting facts revealed about Assist Trophies:
Some Assist Trophy characters have their own HP, and if players deplete it with attacks they can even be KOed with a strong enough attack. This earns the defeating player a point, although it doesn’t cost the player who picked up the trophy a point.
Usually the owning player can’t attack their own trophys, but if the trophy has started glowing, a state they get into when very low on health, the trophy will actually become vulnerable to attacks even by the player who collected it. This is so they can earn the point before another player earns it.
The trophy with the highest health is Mother Brain, with a base health of 120 HP.
“Base health,” what’s that? Assist Trophys that have health get more health the more players are in the game! This goes up to twice their usual health if there’s eight players.
A good number of trophies have health, and can be attacked, than you’d might think. For example, in the trophy of Color TV Game 15, an early Pong-clone Nintendo made in 1977, the paddles are vulnerable to attack. Each has only 15 HP, but the trophy is defeated if either paddle is defeated.
The Starman trophy, if it’s defeated, displays the SMAAAAASH!! message from Earthbound!
Each Assist Trophy has a list of stages is can’t appear on. Very few trophies can appear on absolutely any stage. One of them is Lyn from Fire Emblem.
There are even trophies that get blocked by Omega or Battlefield versions of certain stages. Usually these are trophies that reside in the background in some way, like Midna or the Moon from Majora’s Mask.
Each Assist Trophy also has a list of items, and other Assist Trophies, that it disables, that can’t generate while it’s active, and alternatively, if that item or trophy currently exists in the world, that prevent it from appearing.
Referring to that last point, “existing” can mean many things. Like, an item held in Isabelle’s pocket still exists in the world, and so will block all the items that can’t generate while it’s instantiated almost indefinitely.
AsumSaus is probably best known for their Smash Bros. Melee videos, and it was they who made the terrific video (54 minutes) about aMSa, the Yoshi player who won major tournaments. And hey, we linked to that back in 2023.
They’ve been diversifying a bit since, and their most recent video is on alternative communication in games. (21 minutes) How so alternative? As in, ways to talk to players without talking to them, either via speech or direct text.
They give a few examples. The first is when Blizzard changed the /spit emote so that it couldn’t be used to specify someone to spit on, when players used that means to express disgust over people who bought a $70 paid mount. The second is the piecemeal phrase building system used to leave environment messages for people in Souls games, also known as template messages. And third, canned messages from Smash-style and modded Smash games.
I could link the things that everyone already knows about, that people in that wretched hive they call Reddit have already linked five times, that have blown up on social media, that there’s already a Youtuber or two making snide comments about. I mean, I’ve linked stuff like that before, pretty often really. They aren’t hard to find.
But I’d much rather link something interesting that’s basically unknown. Help spread the word about it! The only problem there is, how do you find that stuff in the first place? It’s a bit of a chicken-or-David-Egger. I think that’s what you’d call it, sure.
So when I saw someone I follow on Bluesky wrote out nearly every Nintendo video game property, including those that appeared on niche platforms like Virtual Boy and Satellaview, primarily so they could boldface the ones that have arrived on Nintendo Music, I had to run directly here to link to it.
The beginning of a long list
I don’t vouch for its total accuracy, but it still could be a useful resource. In fact I know there are some things that are missing, like their early arcade games Sheriff or Radar Scope, just for starters. But if the idea is to present things that realistically could present soundtracks included in Nintendo Music, it’s a pretty good list.
Dwarf Fortress has always been a game about failure. It’s right there in its motto, “Losing is fun!” It’s a game where you just muddle through, doing what you can, learning as you go, and your games slowly, on the average, get longer and longer the more you play. It’s not that there aren’t guides and tutorials already out there, but the kind of game it is, it halfway feels like they rob something of the player. While I can understand not wanting to start from zero, the sooner the player learns that failure is the end mode of fortresses, the more they’ll understand that the intended way to play is to be audacious.
But which kinds of failure are the most fun? After spending several minutes setting up your expedition getting eaten by wild animals immediately off the wagon is a harsh start to play, especially if it happens repeatedly. Fortress destruction via dragon is scary, but it’s also hilarious; everyone dying on the surface before even digging your first warren is less auspicious.
Dwarf Fortess recently celebrated its 20th birthday, and in celebration Kitfox Games, its Steam publisher, has released a new official beginners video, made by BlindiRL. (34 minutes) It is a good way to move your fortress endings more towards the entertaining end of the scale.
And I’d like to point out, at the end of the video, we’re told that ending a fortress doesn’t quite mean it has to be a failure. If you decide to “finish” a fortress, but then start a new fortress in the same world and of the same faction, then it’s possible for your old dwarfs to decide to emigrate to it. This is something I’ve never tried myself, but it’s a good reason to keep playing in the same world, as you continue to write the saga of your game.
I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobbers, especially its particular form of permadeath, its simulation of “Out” parties and retrieving lost characters from the dungeon, and its willingness to obliterate your entire group instantly and permanently if you teleported into solid stone.
The Bard’s Tale, on the other hand, looks exactly what the standard picture of a classic blobber looks like today. So long as you have the cash to revive a character there is no real penalty for dying, there is no absolutely solid stone to teleport into, and there’s no concept of “Out” parties, for if your party wipes their corpses get mysteriously teleported back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where if there’s enough gold in their cold pockets you, I guess in the capacity of being a caring guardian spirit, can tell the priests to bring them back to life.
But while not as eager to annihilate members of your group, neither is The Bard’s Tale an easy game. Compensating for the lack of permadeath, dungeons tend to be much more diabolical in design, with magical darkness, teleporters, spinners and antimagic zones in evidence. Dungeon levels are bigger than Wizardry’s, there are more of them, and most significantly to a new player, “Town,” here named Skara Brae, isn’t a simple menu of options but an entire level of its own to explore! And at the start of the game, you don’t know where anything except the Adventurer’s Guild is! You have to do significant mapping before you can buy equipment, recharge your spell points, or even raise your experience level.
In this 7th installment of the video series, the player finds and begins to explore the third of the game’s dungeons, finds some interesting items, suffers from disk corruption and loses some progress, earns it back, and fights a jabberwock.
Pinball is tricky enough on its own, but then you “lock” multiple balls in some location, the game’s sound system starts to go nuts, and uh-oh, now all those balls are on the table at once!
Multiball is chaotic, and glorious for it, and it is not always possible to play one well. But you can learn to improve your chances at it, with practice and a decent strategy. For the latter, Tim Sexton explains how to go about it in an 18 minute video.
If multiball were easier, or less chaotic, it wouldn’t be as much fun! And even once you learn some decent tactics to lessen its complexity, like by learning to trap all but one ball on a single flipper and making shots with the remaining ball on the other one, it can still be fun sometimes to just try to make shots. Sometimes that works for me! But learning to play pinball consistently well means not taking on any unnecessary risk, and that’s certainly risky.
Tim’s video not only covers basic multiball tips, but it also examines some specific games, both new and old, and at the end presents examples of multiball play in progress. If you’re interested in improving at pinball, it’s worth a look!
